Fragile (7 page)

They are sitting on the couch, a book open in front of them, a book he must have brought. I have no book in there but the Bible Karl gave me, and that is not a story book or a Bible either, then it is there like an object out of place, condemned to never fit, his hand where it should not be placed in such a matter-of-fact way she sits there transfixed, her whole body pinned down by it, that awful flat hand in the one place in all the earth where it should never be, and the only thing to do is to reach for the nearest thing I can find. I let go of the girl. The closest thing is the vase, the beautiful vase, grab it by the handle and hurl it through the door across the room. It sails so fast and misses, striking the wall above his head. His head dips down automatically to protect itself, the one thing in this house that doesn't need protecting. It hits the wall and shatters, it flies into a bright star of fragments and the moment is broken, lying with him on top of her still, her skull a precious vessel will be broken if he keeps going this way, the small compartment that holds the giant ball of her self will be broken never one whole together again he finds himself lying awake on the king bed with the television on, the sound turned down low, staring up at the ceiling and thinking about the woman on the elevator, the woman who offered herself to him, whom he deceived and could not offer himself to. He is safe here, always taking the
safest way out, the easiest way, the cleanest way out. Yet he wonders what has happened: Did she try to come and find him? Did she go back to her room first or wait a moment in the vestibule and follow him down the corridor and see him go into his room—not the room he told her. A moment of panic which swiftly converts itself into a perverse wave of hope: Perhaps she will come by and knock on the door, any second now. Of course she will. The way she smiled at him in the elevator,
it wouldn't be bad, if you had the right person with you.
Of course she will—she wants him, loves him, in her mind in the elevator while he was still thinking about the floating lead-like feeling of the dinner in his stomach, she was entertaining images of the two of them trapped in the box together taking each other's clothes off and having sex.

Now he wants her to come to his door and knock, he wills her to. This is the kind of fantasy Tris has read about in pornographic magazines, the kind of brief set up shot they use to get the action going in the pay-per-view movies he sometimes samples as a diversion to sway himself to sleep in these nameless hotel rooms he inhabits. And yet, he is so pilgrimatically programmed for the straight and narrow path that he turned this lovely woman away, he knowingly denied himself the opportunity to enjoy this beautiful woman's body, and it fills him with regret.

Tris imagines what the woman is doing now—perhaps she's trying to figure out a way to find him. His only hope is that she would have tried other doors, knocking on the ones nearby the
one he told her. Perhaps she's simply allowing plenty of time for him to make his calls.

Tris presses himself up off the bed and pads over to the door, looking out through the peephole. The hallway is empty, quiet. The view through the tiny opening seems to expand into a kind of rounded off perspective, the walls in one direction absurdly huge in the middle of his view and then shrinking down to a narrowing middle distance in which a few of the other doors down the hall are bent into a strange curving shape, and finally collapsing in the far distance to a kind of nothingness, an obscure edge. The view is also distorted by seeing it with only one eye, giving it a flatness that seems to compress everything towards him, depriving it of depth. His eyes blink at the effort of seeing this way, trying to maintain focus. He pulls his head back for a second, then tries again, aligning his right eye, the dominant one, to the hole, looking first left and then right down the hallway. Across the hall, an opposing door is large and almost undisturbed by the peculiar curvature that shapes the rest of the hall. Tris imagines that in some way this aperture is showing him the present moment straight ahead, with the past narrowing down towards the left and the future shrinking down to the right, both directions of the hallway empty and increasingly distant and unclear.

He has an idea—for a split second it seems like a good one. Maybe he can call the front desk and somehow reach her. But even as he backs away from the peephole, he realizes this is absurd. He doesn't know her name or her room number—all he knows is that she's on the eighteenth floor, and maybe even
that is not true. Perhaps she just followed him to the floor he is on by not pressing another floor in the elevator. Still, he has nothing better to do. He goes to the phone and dials the hotel operator, letting it ring a long time before a man with what sounds like an Arabic accent picks up, carefully pronouncing the hotel's pretentious marketing phrase.

“It's a wonderful night at the Windsor. How may I help you?”

Tris frames the words in his head, deciding the best way to ask this, thinking, I'm trying to reach a woman on the eighteenth floor.

“Hello?” the Arab says, pinching the o sound into more of a rising oo. “How may I help you?”

Tris stays on the line a moment longer, then calmly puts the phone in its cradle without saying a word.

Back on the bed, Tris lies there, staring at the ceiling, and he knows now that the woman is not coming. Another opportunity lost. Another door not opened. And here he is, safe, secure in his cell. His mind slowly spins back to other situations such as this over the years, other women he turned away in favor of the confines of his marriage. He ticks them off in his head, working backwards one by one, making a list. The woman from the church Bible study group who phoned one day a year or two ago, sounding surprised to reach him, asking if she could come by to drop something off, a parcel for the outreach ministry, knowing full well he was alone and Laura was out of town, visiting her sister in Tulsa. There was the co-worker from the home office, confiding to him over drinks at a cocktail lounge
in Chicago that she didn't mind being married—she loved her husband—but she missed the wild, wanton sex she used to have with strangers.

There was the neighbor long ago when he was first married, who used to flirt shamelessly with him, dropping hints every now and then that she was available if he wanted her. Tris ticks off their names in his head, a dozen or more—too many to count really—some of them nameless, like the woman tonight, nothing more than blurry memories, each of them turned away through a combination of fear and an overriding desire to stay in the right. And this brings him back to the first one, whose name he will never forget, so long ago it seems like another person's life. Fifty or sixty years ago it was. Whatever happened to Amelia?

The ceiling above his head is too low, eight feet at most, and the ceiling tiles seem to be shifting slightly, pressing down on him. The acoustic tiles are filled with thousands of little holes to absorb the sound, a dizzying random configuration like black stars in a white sky. Tris stares at these holes as they move, shift. There is something about them, one tile separated from the next by an aluminum strip. And then he sees it, in the first tile, directly above his head: A repetition. There is a certain pattern, a kind of pinwheel arc aligning one sequence of holes, like the arm of a galaxy, and as he lifts his head to look closer he sees it again, several inches away from the first, the same swirling pattern of holes.

He looks at other sections of the tile and he can see different alignments, different sizes and shapes of holes, and as his eye
moves across the tile he recognizes other recurrences, other places where certain arrangements reappear. For an instant, it's as if he's seeing down into the sky and the wide expanse of nothingness he fell into earlier is back. The patterns are all evident—they were there all along, but his mind wasn't attuned to this level of detail. He remembers reading something in a magazine article, something that seemed strange at the time, but makes perfect sense now. The article said that a scientist in eastern Europe, a mathematician most likely or a physicist, was debunking all the recent research about chaos and randomness. This man said there is no such thing as randomness—nothing is random. There is a pattern—a design—for everything: weather, the forking of a tree's branches, the shapes of clouds, constellations of stars. It's just that the patterns are at a level of complexity our brains cannot possibly process, so we see them as random. And Tris imagines now a machine in a factory somewhere—a plant that may well be using one of his computer systems—punching a precise pattern of holes into thousands upon thousands of acoustic tiles, diligently, mindlessly repeating the same sequence of holes over and over again.

“G
OODBYE
E
NRIQUE
.”

“Where you going?” he says, sitting on the other side of the porch, chewing seeds on Elmer's porch, in the metal chair where Elmer used to sit.

“Going downtown,” I say, not telling him everything. “Going to do some shopping.” He doesn't need to know exactly where I'm going. “I won't be back until late.” All morning the smell of that man was in the house, in the front room, the smell of his after shave cologne, the same color as his champagne car. Down the steps, careful now, take each one sideways, both feet on one, then the next one, then both feet on the next. They seem to be steeper now through the gate in the fence, his champagne car parked right here in front, but he hurried out didn't he when I broke the porcelain vase, when I threw it at him he scurried off right away. He didn't say a word of goodbye to those girls, those precious girls, I want you to stop making that noise—this instant!” Holly's head pounds as she turns slowly, gingerly, to look at the clock on the table across the room. It seems to be a great distance from her. She has to
squint to make out the position of the absurdly ornamental hands, each composed of a flowing scrollwork so complex that it is difficult to tell the difference between the big hand and the small hand. Three-thirty it seems to be saying—can it be? Where has the day gone? Lying on the couch all morning with a blanket over her and the frantic gibbering of the Saturday morning cartoons, she had to call in sick again, her head swimming as if it has been submerged in a vast vat of liquid teeming with muffled noises, a throb of pain at the back of her skull any time she turns her head. Saturday, her biggest day of the week, seven customers canceled and all because of Rick. No, not Rick. She knows it was her own overweening need for him, her own baseless hunger that got her into this again.

“Turn off the TV Jenny,” she says. “You've had it on all day.” Beyond the crest of a fold in the blanket that covers her, the screen flickers with frenzied images. Jenny ignores her mother for a moment and Zoe sits beside her Indian-style on the living room floor of the small apartment, fumbling with something in her hands.

“I said turn it off, and I
mean
it.”

She really shouldn't yell at them, the effort of opening her mouth that wide and expelling the words sends a spasm of pain up the back of her head. Jenny looks around at her mother, to see if she's really serious, and Holly returns the look. Then Holly closes her eyes for a moment and lets her head sink into the pillow, inhaling and then releasing a deep breath. Let them watch if they want to, she thinks. The reddish-orange afterimage of the screen glows on the backs of her eyelids, floats there
and contorts into a lozenge of fading brilliance. Let them watch. Why should she be so hard on them after she made them stay at the old lady's house last night and now here they are stuck in the apartment with her all day today. Jenny was so good, getting bowls of cereal for Zoe and herself this morning, opening a can of tomato soup with the electric can opener and heating it for their lunch. Jenny must think her mother is a drunk—she knows about it now, they teach them about drugs, and cigarettes, and drinking in school. Maybe sex too, in fifth or sixth grade. Or maybe that's next year. Zoe just thinks that she's sick all the time, but this time is more than a hangover. The back of her head is pounding, where it slammed into the lip of the sink. And then, as she lies there with her eyes closed, drinking in the grey darkness, the sound of the TV goes away.